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Does a blue background results in cut-out pics?
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Was chatting to a friend yesterday and we got into a bit of a conflab about some jewellery shots he saw being taken in a clients workshop. Apparently the photographer was using a blue background. When the shots came back the background was completely white and he was told that photoshop was not used to make it so.
I asked him if the camera was a film or a digital one, and he said digital, but wasn’t sure. This doesen’t sound right to me. I know that the movie makers use a ‘green screen’ background when they want to superimpose a different backdrop, but I wasn’t aware that this could be done on digital.
Does anyone have any info on this?
Dave
Dave
what you are talking about is either a chroma key or a colour key.
generally they are green or blue backgrounds for film and video, although they are particular colours of green and blue etc
in the film and video business to do a chroma key, cut the background out. there is always a piece of equipment or software to do it, the camera doesnt do it.
so it would be the equivalent of photoshop for video to simplify it. actually it could be a piece of video equipment too that does it
the important thing when using chroma backgrounds it the lighting and reflections. in the case of jewellry the reflections of the blue in the jewellry make me think that it was done using a colour cast removal technique. as a chroma key or cut out would still leave a blue cast on the actual object as reflections etc
There’s no difference between a green screen and a blue screen, it’s just a case of choosing a colour to give contrast between the subject and the background for easy masking, hell you could probably use an orange screen depending on the subject. I’m not sure what you mean by
I wasn’t aware that this could be done on digital
, I pressume you mean you didn’t realise this could be done on digital without photo-editing software, in which case I completely agree. Of course if the backdrop was only very lightly blue a little white balance and exposure compensation tomfoolery could make it look pretty white but that would look pretty obvious. I wonder though if this is a misunderstanding, the photographer not answering the question the client was asking but the one he thought the client was asking, some critical detail lost in the retelling. My money is on the photographer meaning “it’s still the same background, I just desaturated it”.
//Cian
You can use any colour to key to, but the reason the particular green and blue are used is their crominance values. ie most objects dont have those exact colours in them
when you use another colour its called a colour key and generally done with software.
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